by Colin Harper
MacColl’s vitriol in print had precisely the result he had doubtless intended. Letters poured in to the Melody Maker, pages were devoted to pop and folk personalities giving responses, with phrases like ‘sour grapes’ and ‘ivory tower’ endlessly repeated. But there were many who conceded that the godfather of the British folk revival may have had a point. The most telling observation was from Marianne Faithfull: ‘In a way I think he is right, but he is the wrong person to say so.’33 If anyone had been a pop product of the ‘folk boom’ it had been Marianne. In May ’65, her record label had released two debut albums simultaneously: one a pop record, the other folk. Her next album, North Country Maid, would feature a cover of Bert’s ‘Courting Blues’. A ‘pop-folk’ artist like Donovan and Dylan, Marianne was somebody else for MacColl to despise. But MacColl’s time was over: his rant against Dylan and the populism of folk music was his valedictory address.
Robert Shelton, later a Dylan biographer, summed up the sadness but also the determination to move forward felt by many for whom folk music was an exciting and ever-evolving adventure: ‘I have enormous respect for MacColl as a singer, writer and philosopher of the folk revival,’ he wrote at the time, ‘but he is so thoroughly out of touch with Dylan’s generation that it was ill-advised of him to pontificate from his lofty and distant eminence. The Dylan generation is making its own rules in belief, political commitment and literary and musical style.’34 They were indeed, and in London their centre of government would be a tiny little cellar in Soho, seemingly owned by somebody called Les: ‘Les Cousins’.
Pronounced Lez Cuzzins, universally abbreviated to ‘the Cousins’ and almost never recalled or referred to at the time by anyone in the intentional French pronunciation Lay Coo-zan, the proprietors of 49 Greek Street were a likeable middle-aged Greek couple by the name of Matheou, anglicised to Matthews. They ran a restaurant on the ground floor; the floor upstairs was rented out to an illegal gambling club; and downstairs, operated initially by one Phil Phillips (agent for Irish entertainer Noel Murphy) and subsequently by their son Andy, in the cellar that had once been used by Russell Quaye for skiffle sessions, was the most extraordinary new folk club in town. Remembered as the very cradle of the singer-songwriter-guitarist explosion of the mid to late sixties, the Cousins’ existence spanned April 1965 to the early weeks of 1970, though its origins remain shrouded in myth.
‘Around the Christmas season Les Bridger used to disappear,’ says John Renbourn. ‘No one knew where he went but he was always drunk when he came back. Turned out he was in a pantomime, crowd scenes in Peter Pan. Anyway, one night he was weaving back through Soho and actually fell down into a basement doorway where there was a room full of young girls – some sort of student establishment. So Les told them he was the world’s greatest guitar player and that was just what they needed. So then and there the Cousins started and we had a regular place to play.’35
Whatever the truth, it could never have been anticipated that such a tiny, uncomfortable, unremarkable, unlicensed and almost certainly unprofitable place would become such a legend. Accommodating perhaps one hundred and fifty people at a pinch, it had membership and entrance fees measured in shillings, a backroom bar serving tea and sandwiches, and decor comprising a giant wagon wheel on the wall and fishermen’s netting draped from the ceiling. The facilities for making music were sparse: a small stage, a piano in the corner, one electrical socket and a microphone. It was, if nothing else, the only ‘folk’ club at that time with a microphone.
In retrospect, the list of residents, regulars, the advertised and the unexpected who passed down the narrow steps of the Cousins provides a virtual roll-call of folk music’s contribution to the ‘Swinging Sixties’. For many of the performers it was a rite of passage, an experience that has created a lifelong bond to that time, that place and those people and to the shared values it represented. Many of those whose careers effectively grew out of an exotic apprenticeship at the Cousins still talk in terms of a brotherhood: there are no class reunions, but it shall always be the ‘Class of ’65’.
In that year, and on into the next, a time-traveller could pick at random any all-nighter session at the Cousins and see any number of extraordinary musicians take the stage: the three kings – Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Davy Graham; the heirs to the thrones – Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Roy Harper, Jackson Frank, Dorris Henderson; the king and queen of ‘pop-folk’ – Donovan and Julie Felix; future legends of folk-rock taking floor spots – Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas, Cat Stevens; emissaries from the living tradition – the Watersons, the Young Tradition, Anne Briggs, Dave & Toni Arthur; emissaries from Outer Space – the Incredible String Band; the godfathers – Alexis Korner and Alex Campbell; stalwarts of the scene – Owen Hand, Les Bridger, Noel Murphy, Martin Winsor and Diz Disley; Hamish Imlach, the clown prince of Scotland conceding occasional visits to the capital; Wizz Jones, the original hippy; Long John Baldry, still with a foot in every scene going; Duffy Power, rock’n’roll survivor and the best British blues singer there was; drop-in Americans of the quality of Doris Troy, Sandy Bull, Arlo Guthrie, Danny Kalb, ‘Spider’ John Koerner, Derroll Adams, the Reverend Gary Davis and Bill Monroe; once-only visitors of the mythic variety – Bob Dylan, John McLaughlin, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. The booking policy would be the broadest in town. Steve Benbow was an early headliner, but the audience were unkind: ‘They thought I was commercial,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t!’ Even Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger came once, typically fearless in the very crucible of the new order.36 All of them, and many more besides – ‘goodly knights of the guitar, riding their instruments like warhorses through the neon world of Soho’37 – played the Cousins in those first two calendar years.
This was the Swinging Sixties in its essence: you had to be there. There was nobody taking photographs, no one with a tape recorder in the corner of the room, nobody writing down set-lists, almost no one shooting film and not a single piece of contemporaneous reportage of any length.38 When amazing things happened, they happened without warning and only for the benefit of those in the room at that time. Only the part-story of the press ads and the fabulous memories remain – memories which, by and large, forget the dull nights and telescope the great ones into one endless, unrepeatable party.
‘It was an alienated sort of place,’ wrote Karl Dallas, grasping for perspective some years later, ‘which didn’t fulfil the promise of the Young Tradition blow-up over the stairs as you descended into the heat and the fug, which seemed to suggest some sort of cross-cultural ferment. For though the mix was there, undoubtedly, it was often hard to distinguish anything at all through the grass-smoke and general stoned-out, crashed-out, all-nighter sheer unconcern of its audiences, who seemed to be there less for the music than the whole phoney ambience of the place. It was a time of polarisation, when the young Turks were about to wrest the folk revival from the hands of the Old Left pioneers who ran the Singers Club and Sing magazine, a schism which is remembered today, wrongly, in terms of attitudes to traditionalism and national culture but which was, in reality, more concerned with lifestyles and a reaction against the puritanical neo-Calvinism of Marxists like Bruce Dunnet and Ewan MacColl, for which the new band of what we were later to call singer-songwriters were to substitute something a great deal more anarchic, more hedonistic, more instinctual, less rational. And yet, something was so obviously happening there, despite the squalor of the place and the blasé uninterest of the audience compared with the rapt, almost religious concentration of the dedicated students at the Singers Club, that one kept returning, and even Bruce Dunnet found himself managing Bert Jansch for a while.’39
It is difficult to explain conclusively why the Cousins carved its name in the annals while other venues – some with advantages of priority or quality of artists, some even momentarily just as popular – are now all but forgotten. Overambition, geography or other factors now obscure may explain the faltering progress or relatively short lives of the Mercury Theatre clu
b in Notting Hill, the Centre in Balham and many others.40 What is less easily explained is the rise and fall of the one venue to offer everything that the Cousins would, and to do so more than three months earlier: the Student Prince in D’Arblay Street. Opening at midnight on Saturday, 2 January 1965, it was the very first of the folk club all-nighters. Soho historian John Platt has sourced the origins of all-nighter music events to a series of ‘raves’ spanning 1951—53 and organised by jazz singer George Melly at Cy Laurie’s club in a basement in Gerrard Street. ‘Although today the idea of spending a whole night in a crowded, airless basement appears extraordinary,’ as Melly explains in his autobiography Owning Up, ‘it was very exciting then.’ Having lain largely dormant for a while, the idea was still exciting in 1965.41
The Student Prince was run by Curly Goss, whose experience of running folk clubs went back at least as far as the King & Queen at the time of Bert’s first visit to London. The winning combination of Alex Campbell, still the biggest draw on the scene, and Dorris Henderson guaranteed the opening night. Two weeks later the MM could note a ‘big turnout’ for the new venue, this time for Dorris with Paul Simon, with other ‘names’ in the audience. Curly was simultaneously running a late-night revue called Two In Folkus, with Dorris and Martin Winsor, at the Little Theatre Club, St Martin’s Lane. Problems at the Prince began on 30 January when the proprietors of the premises had what Goss described as a ‘change of policy’. A month later, on 27 February, it resurfaced as the New Prince at 23 Gerrard Street with an all-nighter featuring Long John Baldry. The next week it was Long John with Dorris, by now a TV star from regular appearances on Gadzooks!; on 27 March, it was Dorris & John Renbourn, now working together as a duo.
The Cousins had opened on a Friday, 16 April, initially advertising a 3 a.m. closedown. For several weeks it avoided going head to head with the Prince, which was only operating on Saturdays. On Saturday, 15 May, having already expanded from one to four nights in the week, the Cousins took the plunge on two fronts: opening on Saturday and advertising as an all-nighter. By this stage the Prince had moved again, to 43 Wardour Street, and had now become the Allnight Folk Prince. The first night of competition pitted the unknown Weston Gavin and Bob Thornton at the Cousins against the unassailable Alex Campbell with Martin Winsor at the Prince. The following week it was Gavin and Thornton against Owen Hand and Joanne Hindley-Smith, again established names. And then there was nothing. The Prince, in all its guises, simply disappeared. Two weeks later the Cousins could celebrate with the first and rarely repeated double-billing of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, and could announce Jansch as its first weekly resident, every Thursday. With the only real threat to custom having somehow lost its way, through too many changes in place or name or whatever else, and the hottest act on the scene having signed up for the long haul, the Cousins could hardly fail. And nor would it.
‘I was resident at the Scot’s Hoose for about a year,’ said Bert, ‘and then also at Les Cousins, which had just started up. I was resident at both for a while, which was mad on the face of it because they were only about a hundred yards apart. But it seemed to work. Often I’d do a night in Bunjies, one in the Scot’s Hoose and one in Les Cousins in the same week. Les Cousins took off at that point and pretty soon people were coming from all over the country to spend the weekend sleeping on the floor of the place. It was run by Andy Matthews, but he didn’t do anything – his parents, who ran the restaurant upstairs, they did most of the work. They were beautiful people. Every wayfaring folk singer would always get fed. That’s why his business went down. It looked a very classy restaurant – the food was superb – but he used to feed any folkies that wandered in, which put all his ordinary customers off. He saved a few people’s lives, did Mr Matthews. Cousins was much more of a meeting place. The Scot’s Hoose was my thing. It was just me and occasional friends, like Sandy Denny, who dropped by. I was usually drunk and either played brilliantly or dreadfully. There were no restrictions – you could play for three hours if you wanted to. Those were crazy days.’42
Bert’s residencies at both the Scot’s Hoose and the Cousins were the making of him as an artist of national reputation. Both residencies would run to the end of 1965, with, on average, one other advertised Greater London gig per week, let alone the sessions at Bunjies (which almost never advertised). There would, of course, be innumerable other shows, at clubs and universities in the regions: ‘Apart from playing the Cousins or dropping into places like that,’ says Bert, ‘you didn’t actually make your living in London. You were travelling to gigs all the time, all over the country.’ The geographical extent and quantity of these gigs is impossible to know now, although Bert rarely if ever worked the long-established club circuit in the South and South-West of England, favouring instead the venues to the North. There are photographs from a gig in Chelmsford in ’65, the letter of apology to the Colchester club, and a handful of reminiscences from here and there. Two provincial clubs Bert did play regularly were at the Blacksmith’s Arms in St. Albans and the Green Man in Old Harlow – both opening in June ’65, under the auspices of Bruce Dunnet’s ‘Associated Folk Clubs’. By that stage Bruce had enough faith in Bert’s drawing power to put him on in both clubs as featured guest for their first and second nights running. Another regular booking was Leicester, where one committed fan was Steve Tilston, who would be recording for Transatlantic himself by the end of the sixties.
‘I remember seeing Bert and Martin Carthy in 1965 within a week of each other at the Leicester Folksong Club,’ says Steve. ‘At that time Martin wasn’t playing anything remotely recognisable as the style he’s got today, whereas with Bert it was already all there – all those pull-offs and slurs and legatos and trills. It was unmistakably his guitar playing, and let’s remember he was the first real British songwriter on the scene. The very idea of writing your own songs in the mid-sixties was really quite revolutionary. For me, sitting in my folks’ front room in Leicestershire, playing his first album, a lot of it seemed to typify London – which is why, as soon as I was nineteen or twenty, I left for London to be part of the Cousins scene. By then, of course, it was on the way down.’
Interviewed in print for the first time in August 1965, in MM, Bert gave his considered view, maintained in subsequent interviews, that ‘the audiences for folk outside London are very good, and those inside London are very bad’. However much he disliked the London scene personally, and however much he was gigging elsewhere, to a very great extent Bert’s career and reputation would be founded on his inextricable association with Les Cousins, the coolest venue in the country, and by the continued appearance of his name in the Melody Maker London club ads. It is not insignificant that the first club to advertise its guest attractions in large bold type, leaping out immediately from anything else on the page, was the Cousins; it is also worth remembering that the one act it was promoting more regularly than anyone else in 1965 was Bert Jansch.
‘I’m sure they got a lot of out-of-town audiences because people would see the ads in the Melody Maker,’ says Ian Anderson, subsequently editor of Folk Roots, but at that point just another kid in the provinces. ‘You already knew that people like Bert and John were the going thing, and after you looked enough weeks and had seen their names in big print at the Cousins you’d want to go there. You would immediately believe that the Cousins was the place to go in London, so it became it.’
‘I’d be up there pretending to be a beatnik with John Steinbeck novels hanging out of my pocket,’ says Pete Frame. ‘I was a provincial hick basically, looking at people and thinking, “Cor, they’re real beatnik kind of people,” and they were probably just up from Bromley thinking the same thing about me! There was tons of posturing going on. We were all bloody weekend beatniks, holding down day jobs.’
It was not only bearded men with duffle coats who found the new scene attractive. As Maggie Holland, a provincial cohort of Ian Anderson’s, observed: ‘Parents seemed curiously untroubled by the thought of their teenage dau
ghters spending Saturday night in Soho, if it was sitting on a cold hard floor listening to some long-haired guitarist.’43 ‘It was a different world completely,’ remembers Val, another regular, ‘there were no rapists or mad people around. There was a trust between people that is gone now. Soho was a safe place. You could spot the prostitutes, the villains, the sex people, but they didn’t want anything to do with young hippies – they’d got their own world. Of course, if we’d been wearing mini-skirts and beehive hairdos we might have been in trouble.’
Never actually calling itself a folk club, the Cousins very quickly developed a culture and etiquette all its own. As a teenager growing up in the West Country, Ian Anderson was typical of the Cousins’ weekend clientele: ‘It was the cheapest hotel in London,’ he says. ‘At some point we twigged that because of the Cousins all-nighters you could go up to London and it wouldn’t cost you – you could hitch up on Saturday morning, do all the running around places like Collet’s in the afternoon and go to the evening session at Cousins, or even stay in the pub across the road. There was a place near Covent Garden called the As You Like It coffee house – a gay, vegetarian place. The waiter would always be trying to persuade you to try his “divine trifle”! The all-nighter never really cracked into action till one o’clock, so quite often we’d go over to this place after the evening session and then go to the all-nighter. Coming out at dawn, Judith Piepe would throw her doors open for breakfasts. She had the famous flat where Al Stewart and Paul Simon stayed, but she also ran some sort of mission hall nearby. At the end of an all-nighter she or her boyfriend Stephen Delft, a guitar maker, would get up on the stage and say, “The tubes don’t start running for another hour. If anybody wants a cup of tea, come with us.”’